


Don't Get Me Wrong

by tenshinokorin



Series: ronin warriors mixtape [1]
Category: Yoroiden Samurai Troopers | Ronin Warriors
Genre: M/M, bishonenink, no unsolicited concrit please, ronin warriors mixtape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-11
Updated: 2014-11-11
Packaged: 2018-02-25 00:16:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2601566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenshinokorin/pseuds/tenshinokorin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rowen's imagination gets the better of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Get Me Wrong

_Once in a while_  
 _Two people meet_  
 _Seemingly for no reason_  
 _They just pass on the street_  
 _Suddenly thunder showers everywhere_  
 _Who can explain the thunder and rain_  
 _But there's something in the air_  
\- The Pretenders

 

Spring was taking its sweet-ass time, Rowen thought, hunched up in his soggy hoodie with the rain thudding on the plastic shelter of the bus stop. There was still snow at the edges of the landscape, and dirty pitted mountains of it huddled in parking lots, unwilling to accept defeat. Rowen's breath was a white plume in the darkness, his fingers cold and clumsy as he tried to free his walkman earbuds from his coat pockets. 

It had been a long walk from the library, and without an umbrella, there was only so much fleece could do. Rowen was wet to the skin under his t-shirt, he'd just missed the last bus and the next one was still twenty minutes away. It was his own fault for trying to track down one more book before leaving the library for the night, his bookbag heavy with everything from Asimov to Zelazny. They were full of new worlds to explore, but the bus stop was too dim for reading, even for him.

Earphones finally in place, he clicked the play button on his walkman, hoping it would distract him while he waited. With his hands shoved in his jeans pockets (the closest thing he had to a dry spot), Rowen bounced in place to the music, and tried not to think about better, warmer places for his hands: around a hot mug of tea, in mittens straight out of the dryer, over an open campfire, under the surface of a steaming hot bath, _into Sage's hair_ \--

Rowen stopped bouncing so hard that the belt clip on his walkman gave way, the tape player clattering on the sidewalk and spitting the mixtape out between Rowen's sneakers. That really didn't concern Rowen; it happened all the time, and only a rubber band would keep the door shut on his battered old Sony. No, what really bothered Rowen was the sudden and very vivid mental image of sinking his chilly fingers into the soft, warm weight of hair at the back of his best friend's neck. 

It had come on so easily in the wake of everything else, and while some of Rowen's warm-hand fantasy had not exactly been realistic (somewhere in that list was the idea of shoving his hands right into the tray of mashed potatoes at KFC), none of them had anything to do with his friends, or their hair, or whether it would be really soft and delicate or heavy like antique silk. Hell, if he was going to go sticking his hands on any of his friends to warm them up, he should have picked Ryou. The man could toast marshmallows on the Wildfire armor's pauldrons. Or what about the thick ruff of fur around White Blaze's face? Rowen knew that was warm and soft, why hadn't he thought of that? 

But no, it had been Sage's hair that came into his mind, vivid and golden. And as Rowen bent to pick up his tape, the vision went from bad to worse. Because thinking about it now it wasn't just warm fingers, but _the way that maybe Sage would lean his head back and show off his throat and maybe make a little noise in the back of his mouth_ and suddenly Rowen wasn't cold anymore and he had a terrible feeling that there was something larger than imminent pneumonia at play in his subconscious mind. For one thing, his jeans had become acutely uncomfortable. 

"What the _hell_ ," Rowen muttered to himself, shoving his walkman back into his bookbag. Listening to Michael Hutchence singing about sex all day really wasn't going to help his situation. If only he had some good boner-killing Enya or something, but that sort of thing was more likely to be in Sai's music collection. Rowen sat down on the bench and fiddled with the fraying zipper pull-strap on his bookbag, face scrunched up in thought. Visions of caressing your best friend's hair did not just drop down out of a cloudy sky, and though psychology was not Rowen's science discipline of choice, he thought he knew enough to unpack the plain, comforting logic behind the vision. It was better than playing it over and over in his mind, anyway. 

First of all, Sage's hair was really remarkable. That was a given. His dad was American, and that was how it came by its extraordinary color. Rowen nodded to himself as he took comfort from this fact. It was obvious then, that Rowen would find Sage's hair more interesting than any of his friends', even Sai's pretty auburn or Mia's henna-red. How many Japanese guys with natural blond hair were there, really? 

(This was a dangerous conclusion. Rowen almost derailed at the understanding that Sage's hair was of course the same color everywhere, and he had to grip the hard plastic edge of the bench to keep his thoughts in order.) 

"Okay," he breathed, thinking that if he worked things out aloud he might have a better chance of focusing. "So it's unusual, that's one. Also, he's not a touchy-feely guy. If I wanted to go feeling someone else's hair, none of the other guys would care. But Sage's kinda hands-off and I can imagine him going ballistic if someone messed up his hair, it must take forever to fix it like that." Rowen inhaled deeply, and then let it out again. His heart had slowed down, and he was even starting to feel cold again, which was a relief. Yes, this was certainly helping. Breaking the thought down into logical chunks made it appear a fluke instead of whatever sordid yearning it had first seemed to be. "So it's rare, plus temptation of the unknown, so..." 

The words _rare_ and _temptation_ and _unknown_ sent a triple volley of sensation right through Rowen's belly, and they were followed by a lot of thoughts about Sage that were anything but wholesome. Or scientific. Or logically explained. In fact they mostly involved Sage's thighs and the shadow under his lower lip and the color of his eyes and the backs of his knees, and Rowen stood up and began pacing with such force that the bus stop could hardly hold him. This wasn't some random subconscious blip, this was... Well. Rowen wasn't sure what it was. But it was bad, and not only was it bad but Rowen had it bad. And he knew it. 

Where the hell had it come from? Rowen was hardly an expert on romance (or lust, for that matter), but he was pretty sure that guys didn't just go from zero to screentone-censored fantasies of their friends in point-oh-two seconds with no provocation whatsoever. 

_So he's hot_ , Rowen conceded, to himself. _That's legit. The other guys are pretty hot too. I'm not blind. Completely valid observation. Ronin Warrior quick generic stats: we're all guys, all of us around eighteen, all bearers of mystical armor, all kinda hot. Assessment acknowledged. Five totally bangable dudes. I'm cool with admitting that. No need to make it a big **deal** or anything._ Rowen tried a few more rounds of Zen breathing. _So I've been sitting around the library all night, and I've gotten kinda...yeah. It happens. That's nothing weird. I'll just take a long hot shower when I get back to the house, and--_

This time Rowen was struck mute even in his own thoughts. He shared both a room and a bathroom with Sage. It was standard practice to make sure nobody needed the shower before hogging it for a while, and the two of them often had to take turns. On a cold, rainy night it was not unlikely that Sage might already be in there, and that teensy-tiny boring, random, everyday detail was suddenly enough to make Rowen feel lightheaded. Because it no longer was just a matter of courtesy to one's roommate. It was a long chain explosion 3-d vision of steam and soap and wet skin and Rowen walked right out of the bus stop and into the rain. 

_Cold water is supposed to be a good cure for this_ , he thought, lifting his face to the downpour and letting it wash over him. _Cold water cold water lots of really cold unpleasant cock-shrinking water--_

"Rowen?" 

Rowen stopped bouncing on his heels and singing "coldcoldcoldrainrainrain" over and over to himself. He stopped looking up at the sky, stopped trying to list about at least ten non-sexy things alphabetically (he'd gotten to "raisins") and stopped telling himself that it was okay if he was gay and his mom for one would be totally cool with that, it's the 90's now for chrissakes. He stopped doing all those things, because Mia's red Samurai jeep was idling at the curb with the wipers flailing, and Sage was at the wheel, looking at Rowen like... well. Like you'd look at your friend when he was dancing out in a freezing cold March downpour and talking to himself. 

"Sage!" 

The Halo warrior eyed him warily. "Well, I guess you haven't entirely lost your mind. What are you doing?"

"I, uh." Rowen bit his lips, as though that would coax the words out faster. Sage sitting there, real and in person, somehow made all of Rowen's past thoughts twice as illicit and three times as embarrassing. "I was um. Looking for the bus?" 

Sage raised one elegant eyebrow. "In the sky?" 

"No, in the--" Rowen cast around the dark bus stop, and his eyes lit up. The plastic windows of the shelter were fogged up and opaque. (From his own desperate fantasies, probably.) "I couldn't see through the windows," he lied. "And I was cold so I was trying to keep warm an'--" 

"Well you're not getting any drier standing there. I saw you'd left your umbrella and came to get you." Sage leaned over to open the passenger side door. "Get in, I'll drive us home." 

"Sweet!" Rowen exclaimed, scrambling into the car. "Thanks, man." 

Sage looked at him sideways as he pulled back out into the road. "Don't thank me, it seems like it's too late. You're drenched. Here." He reached up and unwound his scarf from around his throat, tossing it into Rowen's lap. "Put that on before you freeze." 

Rowen's hands fell on the scarf. It was cashmere--Sage's family didn't scrimp on the New Year's presents--rich green in color and soft as a baby kitten. But more than that it was warm, warm from being nestled against Sage's throat, and as Rowen put it to his chilly face he could smell Sage's scent on it: subtle cologne, genmai chai, lacquered bamboo kendo gear. One perfect golden hair curled up from the weave, and rested against Rowen's cheek. It was soft and thick, like antique silk. 

"Rowen?" Sage glanced from the rainy road to his passenger, who had just curled over on himself with something like a moan. "Are you all right?" 

"Yeah," Rowen breathed, his hands white-knuckled on Sage's scarf, his ears singing gently. "I'm just... getting the feeling back.... was colder than I thought..." 

Sage's frown deepened, he shifted gears to get them over the mountain faster. "You're taking a hot bath as soon as we get home." 

Rowen's response was a full-bodied shudder and a faint nod. Better for Sage to think Rowen was coming down with influenza than to guess the truth. It didn't matter how or why it had happened. All Rowen knew was one undeniable truth: 

He was fucking doomed. 

~o~

**Author's Note:**

> The very first yaoi fic I ever wrote was for these guys. It was 1998. I was in college. I was twenty-two. (It was _terrible_. Please believe me, and don't go looking for it.) I wrote more fic after that. A hell of a lot. Some of it was great, some of it was not so great. Yaoi tropes literally did not exist at the time _because we were still making all of them up_. There were a few of us out there writing, we found each other through geocities webrings and yahoo mailing lists. One day in my hotmail account I got an anonymous fan mail from the woman who is now my wife. I drew fanart instead of doing my painting assignments. I laminated color printouts of grainy artbook scans and papered the walls of my dorm room with them. I stayed up on AIM at all hours talking about them with other fans all over the world in real time, for free--a new kind of miracle. I copied the series over and over and mailed out video tapes to anyone who asked. (It had been off the air for years, there were no official videos, and dvds were unheard of and youtube had not yet been invented.) 
> 
> I must have made a dozen mixtapes for these guys: eighties music, a little bit of the nineties stuff that was out at the time, some of their own songs, shitloads of Erasure. I found a bunch of them just the other day when I was moving some stuff around, smiled at the careful katakana on the tracklists, the hand-colored black and white printouts used for the covers. It was a long time ago. I've tied up all my old storylines for them long since, I've got novels of my own to write now. It's not 1988, and it sure as hell isn't 1998. I am a longass way from 22. But the new subtitled YST dvds are coming out, and bishonenink is back and running once more. 
> 
> It's time to armor up again.


End file.
